Can You Twig It?

When the economy tanked a few years ago, Janice Shields sought a way to expand her seasonal business of Cut It Out garden ornamentation—benches, trellises, and pergolas made from tree branches and vines. Ergo, Cut It Out Inside, the Stockbridge, Mass., designer’s year-round foray into crafting polished versions of her signature twig furnishings for the home. Shields’s bar stools, coffee tables, and consoles are constructed with traditional mortise and tenon joinery, but made out of sticks instead of machined and planed wood. The look is rustic yet elegant; to balance the spindly yet sturdy frames, for instance, Shields culls the richly colored, fragrant heartwood of the Eastern Red Cedar, a species prolific in the western reaches of Columbia County, N.Y.

“An organic element can work in any designscape inside,” Shields explains. “It’s really interesting: you can have a very modern house, but something very beautiful made of sticks and glass will merge with that design really well. It’s refined rustic.”

Her most sought-after pieces, in fact, unite seamlessly with the very structure of a dwelling: custom-crafted railings and banisters for stairways and corridors. [OCTOBER 2010]

Stick Figures: “There are a lot of people who want this,” Shields says of her Cut It Out Inside custom twig furnishings and interior stair banisters (above). Commissioned for an informal family room/kitchenette, her rustic bar stools (below) feature seats made of Eastern Red Cedar heartwood—the hardest, densest, and most fragrant part of the tree, the resins of which act as a natural insect repellent.

THE GOODS

Cut It Out Inside
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.0677